'Million Mom March' Spotlights Gun Safety

Josey1

'Million Mom March' Spotlights Gun Safety


IRVING, Texas, 6:59 p.m. CDT June 20, 2002 - As part of a local initiative to promote gun safety, dozens of Dallas children and their moms gathered in Irving to plant 224 flowers in remembrance of the 224 local children who have been killed by guns during the past year.



The ceremony was part of "Asking Saves Lives Day," started by the Dallas chapter of the "Million Mom March," a grassroots organization leading the fight to prevent gun violence
According to the group, many gun deaths could be prevented if parents would just question each other. "Asking Saves Lives Day" reminds them to do just that.

"You certainly ask if your child is going to be around alcohol or drugs, but don't think to ask about guns, which are incredibly deadly," mother Dawn MacMullan said.

Organizers from the Dallas chapter say that it's not the gun at issue, but whether those weapons are stored and out of children's reach. According to the organization, there is at least one gun in almost half of Texas homes, and 60 children die from gun violence each week nationwide.

However, children attending the event said that they know what to do to keep safe.

"We should never pick up a gun or be around one that is loaded and if we see a gun, we should go away and tell a grown up," child Tom Phillips said.

Participating doctors will be handing out flyers and posters as part of the campaign, reminding parents to ask how guns are handled in the homes in which their children play.

"It's all in our best interest ... it's in our children's best interest to just ask," mother Mary Preussel said.




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"If cowardly and dishonorable men sometimes shoot unarmed men with army pistols or guns, the evil must be prevented by the penitentiary and gallows, and not by a general deprivation of a constitutional privilege." - Arkansas Supreme Court, 1878

Josey1

Trigger Issue:
The World's Gun Dump
China, Japan And Brazil Export To Us The Guns Prohibited At Home

Tom Diaz is senior policy analyst at the Violence Policy Center, a nonpartisan, nonprofit group working to reduce gun violence. He has worked as a journalist and was Democratic counsel to the Crime Subcommittee of the House of Representatives from 1993 to 1997.

Editor's Note: Copyright c 1999 Making a Killing: The Business of Guns in America by Tom Diaz. Reprinted by permission of The New Press.




This excerpt from Making A Killing: The Business of Guns in America is the second in a series, called "Trigger Issue," taken from New Press books on guns in America. Future excerpts will also come from The Second Amendment in Law and History and Every Handgun is Aimed at You. To order these and other books, visit The New Press, a non-profit publishing house in the public interest. Click here for the first excerpt.


For some reason, many Americans -- even those in the gun control movement -- think the United States is a net exporter of civilian firearms. Nothing could be further from the truth. Although there are certainly areas (e.g. Latin America) in which illicit trafficking in civilian firearms from the United States is a problem, many more civilian firearms pour into the United States than leak out of it.

The wide-open U.S. market is a powerful magnet for foreign gun manufacturers. Civilian gun imports grew dramatically between 1978 and 1994, the peak year so far. Between 1978 and 1996, 20,462,605 guns were imported for the U.S. civilian market.

Handguns soared to dominate the import market over this period. In 1978, handguns accounted for only 24 percent of imported civilian firearms. But in 1994, handguns represented 62 percent of the same import market....

It is interesting to note that most, if not all, of the foreign gun manufacturers who export to the United States cannot sell their products to civilians at home as freely as they can here. These countries all have stricter gun control laws than the United States and much lower rates of firearms violence.

For example, only 1.2 percent of Japan's 1993 gun production stayed in Japan, which has very strict gun control laws. At the same time, 80 percent of its top three gun manufacturers' production went to the United States. A substantial portion of these guns are marketed in the United States under the Browning mark (other Browning long guns are made in Belgium and assembled in Portugal).

For another example, the Brazilian company Taurus began shipping revolvers to the U.S. market in 1968 after the Brazilian government "imposed restrictive handgun control legislation that greatly cut into Taurus's [domestic] market." According to the gun press, virtually all of the company's production of 9mm serni-automatic pistols is exported because Brazilian law forbids civilian ownership of such guns.

It is virtually impossible to reconstruct any specific foreign company's share of the U.S. market, since import data are aggregated only by country and not by company. But the following brief case study illustrates the extent to which other countries have been dumping firearms on the United States.




Military-Style Assault Guns: The China Connection
The People's Republic of China jumped aggressively into the U.S. gun market in the late 1980s. China -- which prohibits most of its citizens from owning guns of any kind -- dumped millions of cheap military-style assault weapons and handguns, and tons of ammunition, on the United States to get hard currency it badly needed. This eruption of Chinese imports caused one of the greatest single escalations of civilian firearms lethality in the history of the United States.

China's paramilitary exports were fueled by rivalry between two government-owned companies, China North Industries Corp. (Norinco) and PolyTechnologies, who locked horns in battle over the U.S. market. In addition to seeking hard currency, the companies wanted U.S. sales in order to keep production lines open, "because you have to keep that capability in case of war," according to an arms dealer interviewed by The Washington Post. The Post said analysts compared the Chinese government companies to "rival private U.S. companies who sell jet fighters and other military equipment abroad." (Some analysts, however, thought the two companies, as part of the same Chinese military establishment, were actually colluding to saturate the U.S. market.) In either case, Guns & Ammo writer Garry James described the Chinese impact on the U.S. market as follows:


In the firearms trade, if this decade can be noted for anything (other than perhaps the emergence of the "wondernine" auto pistol), it would have to be the introduction of the large number of products coming from The People's Republic of China. Besides the fact that the Chinese have all but made the assault rifle business their own ... they have brought in handguns, target .22s and original "broomhandle" Mausers [pistols], to name just a few items.
Before 1982, China exported only a handful of guns to the United States. Between 1982 and 1986, its firearms exports grew slightly, but its rifle exports to the United States never exceeded 6 percent of total American rifle imports.

That changed in 1987, when Chinese rifle imports surged to 22 percent of total U.S. rifle imports. The surge was reflected in an explosion of assault rifle imports. According to ATF figures published in 1989, only 8,131 AK-47s were imported into the United States in the two years ending in 1986. But AK-47 imports soared to 40,379 in a 14 month period during 1988 and 1989, and 90 percent of those were Chinese.


Some who bought cheap Chinese guns would eventually "trade up" to higher quality U.S. firearms.
The number may actually have been much greater, however. ATF officials estimated that "tens of thousands" additional AK-47s may have been smuggled into the country between 1986 and May 1989 and a dealer cooperating with ATF investigators said that the number of smuggled AK-47s could have been has high as five hundred thousand.

China accounted for 42 percent of all rifles imported into the U.S. civilian market between 1987 and 1994, the year in which President Clinton finally blocked the Chinese gun dumping. This flood of Chinese weapons was so great that it not only affected the U.S. rifle market, it strongly boosted the overall import of guns to the United States: Chinese rifles and handguns accounted for 15 percent of all firearms imported for the civilian market in six of the eight years between 1987 and 1994, and in 1993 accounted for more than a quarter of all such guns imported.

In other words, if the Chinese had not started dumping guns on the United States, the total number of guns imported, sold and out on our streets -- especially semiautomatic assault weapons -- would have been significantly smaller.

The domestic gun industry did not see the flood of Chinese competition as all bad: Cheap guns would not only stimulate U.S. interest in firearms generally, it would also mean that some who bought cheap Chinese guns would eventually "trade up" to higher quality U.S. firearms. In the meantime, however, Chinese assault rifles like the SKS showed up in criminal hands on the streets. As one ATF expert put it in 1993:


The difference is this, and it is important. Instead of a police officer going into some house where some wacko is holed up with a smaller rifle like a .22 ... now the guy's got a Chinese army gun; a real rifle.... The officer is walking into a much more dangerous situation.... A .22 won't penetrate his bulletproof vest. But a 7.62 by 39mm -- that these SKSs shoot -- will. It'll penetrate a vest fairly effectively up to 250 yards. That's the difference.
The problem was compounded when it was discovered that some Chinese SKS and MAK-90 rifles that were being imported ostensibly as semiautomatics were actually entering the United States capable of firing fully automatically -- in other words, as illegal machine guns -- and some ammunition being imported from China was of the illegal armor-piercing variety.

These incidents underscore the difficulty of controlling foreign imports. The system in the United States for controlling the import of firearms is based on the belief that government paperwork, namely an import license granted to an importer for a certain number of specific guns, will match the ultimate on-the-ground reality. In fact, the system depends almost entirely on the foreign exporter actually shipping guns and the domestic importer faithfully conforming to the terms of the paper, since neither customs inspectors nor ATF agents examine every or even most gun shipments from abroad.

Import of Chinese guns was effectively stopped in 1994 when President Clinton imposed a ban as a condition of renewing China's "most favored nation" trading status. Gun importers complained about the decision and set up a new front group, the Firearms Importers Roundtable Trade Group (FAIR) to contest it. The group opened diplomatic relations with the ATF and announced "a new era of better communications" with the regulatory agency, whose director reciprocated with overtures to the industry at large. By 1996, FAIR was able to announce in an open letter that "by quietly working with the Congress, the Department of State, ATF, and foreign governments, we have been able to maintain the availability of guns and ammunition which earn good profits for the Dealer." Meanwhile, the gun import industry looked to Russian firearms as potential replacements for the Chinese guns, setting off yet another battle.

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"If cowardly and dishonorable men sometimes shoot unarmed men with army pistols or guns, the evil must be prevented by the penitentiary and gallows, and not by a general deprivation of a constitutional privilege." - Arkansas Supreme Court, 1878